definition

Kind of like a wiki, but live, combination of IRC and real-time editing a doc.

I think it would be very helpful in brainstorming the theming docs nav hierarchy - Diigo just lets us put tags and notes on the handbook pages themselves, which will help us to come to agreement on topic terminology, but there's no wiki-like functionality.

And a live "nav sprint", getting a few heads together and discussing/working on the same doc real-timewould IMO help move us forward to common ground more quickly.

For wider feedback and consensus building, the results of such a sprint could be posted to the wiki under our Group if we use that, or even here in the issues queue or the mail-list

Options:

Apparently GoogleDocs tries this, but has an issue with delays, maybe 30 sec between updates.

MoonEdit looks good, but I'm not sure how reliable/responsive the public server(s) would be.

I'd like some people to test these two out with me, maybe supplement with the docs team IRC channel, anyone know how to set up that scheduling thing Addi uses for our IRC meetings?

For those wanting to research others, here's a big list.

Comments

keith.smith’s picture

keith.smith commented

Etherpad is another similar product that's getting lots of press lately. Here's an illustrative post: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-11-20-n42.html

dawehner’s picture

dawehner
Primary language German
commented

I vote for Gobby

its build on gtk, so its avaible for windows mac and linux and it looks quite nice: http://gobby.0x539.de/screenshots/gobby-0.4.90-linux.png

In addition its in development in contrast to moonedit.

The update rate is incredible. You can write together with 3 people in one line without having conflicts

If someone wants to try it out install the 0.4.8 version because the next version is quite unstable

HansBKK’s picture

HansBKK commented

great dereine, but my first impression is its not too easy to setup, own protocol

Does it work peer-to-peer over plain IP or would someone have to setup an Infinote server?

dawehner’s picture

dawehner
Primary language German
commented

Everyone can create his own gobby server in the stable version 0.4.8. He has only open his port 6552 on his router

BUT there is no binary for MAC OSX, but i know someone who has one, just waiting for his reply

HansBKK’s picture

HansBKK commented

Etherpad is closed beta.

Dereine, if you're willing to help me get the server setup - never mind I'll twitter you

dawehner’s picture

dawehner
Primary language German
commented

i pinged you in irc ^^ and now also in twitter

HansBKK’s picture

HansBKK commented

OK Dereine and I just had a Gobby session, soft was easy as pie to install, no config needed other than choose a name and color (warning choose light pastels! ), plug in a hostname and away you go.

Both of us were chatting and editing the same text doc real-time. Each participant gets a different background color for their text and it IS real-time, no delay at all.

No dedicated server required, but I'm going to have to futz around with my black-box router I haven't touched for three years to be able to host a session from my own machine. In the meantime, dereine's going to ask a friend with an always-up server if we can use that.

Reference - download location http://releases.0x539.de/gobby/ don't user .49 , Linux .48, Win .47, don't know about Mac.

If anyone wants to try any of the other tools, let me know (it does take two!), but in the meantime, I'm sold on Gobby.

Unless something else has block/column-based editing, I miss that, and that would be very helpful in sketching out navigational hierarchies in ASCII art. . .

Which brings to mind - anyone have better ideas for this last use case? A tool that would let us drag and drop whole branches around online live in an interactive session? IRC could always handle the chat.

Anyway big thanks to Daniel (dereine) for his time in helping out with this piece. . .

add1sun’s picture

add1sun commented

Gobby is a good tool. I've used it in other projects in the past but the lack of a Mac binary could be a problem, as it will probably exclude a number of users from collaborating. Last time I looked, compiling it for yourself on Mac was non-trivial.

HansBKK’s picture

HansBKK commented

OK, any members of the theming workgroup that are Mac only AND want to participate in live editing sessions, speak up!

add1sun’s picture

add1sun commented

Heh, well I do have access to other OS but I'd really rather not have to fire up parallels for this (my use of gobby in the past was when Ubuntu was my main computer and I have since moved to Mac). And while I have the skills to do the manual compiling stuff I really don't want to, since I have lots more interesting things to do on my plate already.

dawehner’s picture

dawehner
Primary language German
commented

here is a free browserbased solution

i testet it with two browser on the same system, and it worked. But definitive slower than gobby or other related tools

http://collabedit.com/display?id=46489

leehunter’s picture

leehunter commented

There's a Darwin port thing for Gobby on the Mac http://gobby.darwinports.com/ I'm not a Mac guy (at least not yet) so I don't know if that's helpful or not.

At the Montreal DrupalCamp this fall they were using Gobby for collaboratively taking conference notes. I seem to recall that there's no reverting to a previous version, so if someone accidently wipes a page or a big chunk of text it's gone.

Koumbit (the venue for the camp) has set up a dedicated server for Gobby because they use it a lot.

HansBKK’s picture

HansBKK commented

Sure would be nice if that were built in, but:

Anyone in the session can do a file save, from then on Ctrl-S will take a quick snapshot.

And of course if you also set it to a filename you'd already put under version control, just setup a keystroke macro saving the file and committing it and the whole history of the session's in your VCS, cron it as frequently as you like, etc.

I finally go around to revisiting my router to allow me to serve that port number, so I should be good to try a demo session if anyone want to schedule one after hours GMT+7.

MGParisi’s picture

MGParisi commented

Lets just create a page that offers options to collaborate in real time.

add1sun’s picture

add1sun commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

The theming working group isn't active anymore, so I'm closing this issue.